She bought a sculpture for $34 and it turned out to be 2000 years old!
A woman who bought a white marble statue of a human head in a popular charity store was shocked to discover after a while that she had bought a historical masterpiece whose real age exceeds 2000 years.
Laura Young, an antiques dealer from Austin, Texas, bought a 50-pound bust in 2018 for just $34 and bundled it into her car with a seat belt to take home.
Laura Young contacted an auction house in London to display her sculpture, to get the shocking answer, that the sculpture is most likely a bust that served as a portrait of the Roman general Drusus Germanicus, and that the date of its sculpture can be traced back to two thousand years.
According to the house's information, its last known location was in the 1920s and 1930s in a museum in the German city of Aschaffenburg that was built in the 1840s and was heavily damaged in World War II.
Stephenie Mulder, professor of art history at the University of Austin, suggested that an American soldier either looted the bust himself or bought it from someone else who preceded him.
The whereabouts of the bust remained a mystery since then until it randomly appeared in a charity store in Austin.
With the discovery of his provenance, and his stolen origin, Young must return him to Germany, where this is now supervised by a lawyer in New York who specializes in international art law, according to the Andy100 website.
However, this process took much longer than expected due to the Covid epidemic, during which time Young was able to display the bust at her home, and take pictures with him.
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